Page 69 of Protective Pucking Orc

Jord was reenacting the game-winner for anyone who’d hold still, complete with sound effects. Bardon had given up on herding anyone anywhere. Somewhere behind me, Kardok was arguing with a reporter about whether the hit in the third had been clean—it had, mostly—and I barely heard any of it, because the double doors at the end of the corridor swung open and my whole world walked through them.

Sofia, in my jersey, my name across her shoulders. Rosa drooping against her hip, rubbing her eyes, fighting sleep with the fury of a kitling who did not want the day to end.

I stopped walking.

The team flowed around me like I was a rock in a river, and Sofia came toward me through them, and I knew.

I don’t know how to explain what I saw, except… I don’t know. I remembered the first time I’d stood outside a house and looked at the electric lights through a glass window, amazed that warmth could be contained that way. And now, it was like the glass was gone; I could see the light, feel the heat.

She looked at me across that loud, crowded corridor and there was nothing careful in it anymore, no bracing, no half-step back, no confusion behind her eyes.

Her gaze hit mine and held, wide open, and my Kteer went silent for one full heartbeat.

Then it began to sing.

Not the snarl I’d lived with since the parking lot. Not the anxious circling of these last days. This was a sound I’d never heard from inside my own chest—low and rising and joyous, the sound my father must have known, and his father, all the way back to the first orc who ever stood beside a female and understood he was home.

She was my home.

A grin pulled at my mouth, slow, helpless. I couldn’t have stopped it with both hands.

Sofia saw it, and her own smile bloomed to match—shy and certain at once, the smile of a female who had decided something and intended to see it through—and around us the celebration roared on, oblivious.

Torrk had discovered Rosa and was announcing to the entire corridor, the press, and possibly the gods that she was his good luck charm and would be required at all future games: “The Torrk Method now has a mascot!”

We didn’t join the noise, either of us.

We didn’t need it.

She stopped in front of me. Rosa reached out one sleepy arm without even lifting her head from her mother’s shoulder, and I took them both against my chest, my daughter tucked warm in the middle, my Mate’s cheek coming to rest over my heart.

Perfect calm, in the eye of all that joy.

Torrk, of course, ruined it. He slapped me on my back as he went past. “Congratulations, D’kap! I’ll tell Bardon and Coach that you’re going to be missing practice tomorrow! Have fun!”

I wanted to roll my eyes at his smirk, but I had to admit that he was right. The gods had put an opportunity to claim my Mate in front of me, and I wasn’t going to miss it.

I squeezed my females.

“Hi,” Sofia said softly, into my chest.

“Hi,” I rumbled back.

Her hand found mine. Squeezed.

“Take us home, Dakvaar.”

And the gods themselves could not have gotten me to that truck faster.

Rosa was asleep by the time we reached the house, and after I carried her inside, Sofia took her from me with a small smile. “I’ll get her to sleep; you go get cleaned up.”

Unable to stop myself, I blurted, “And then?”

Her smile grew until it was something full of wicked promise. “Then I’ll meet you in our room, and I’d like you to not be wearing any clothing, Mate.”

Mate.

Gods below, did she have any idea how that word on her lips wrapped around my cock, stroking it? My Kteer howled again, urging taste claim fuck Mate claim claim CLAIM!